Chapter Twenty-Nine

September 1

I text Michael as I’m waiting for the barista to make two lattes. I ask him if we can talk.

He texts back immediately.

MICHAEL WEAVER

Yes. Where?

I hesitate, chewing my lip, thumbs hovering above my phone. I can’t go to his house. I know, somehow, that this will be much

harder if I go to that house. And even though I know what I want, even though I know what I need—maybe for the first time

ever—the act of choosing, actively choosing, hurts more than I ever thought it would.

ME

Meet at the falls in an hour?

Three little dots pop up on my phone screen. Michael typing. They bounce and then disappear. Bounce and then disappear. Finally,

after the third time:

MICHAEL WEAVER

ok

A twinge goes through me, because I know he’s wondering what’s going on. I know he wants to ask—that he probably started to

ask before deleting what he wrote.

But I don’t want to try to explain any of this over text.

I drive back to Mom’s house with the lattes in the cup holders. She’s on the phone when I walk in the door, pacing back and

forth in the kitchen, in shorts and a blousy tank top, while Mr. Grumpy watches from his spot on top of a pile of papers that

we still need to recycle.

She jabs her finger at her cell phone. Movers, she mouths at me.

I nod and hold out the cup of coffee. Her eyes light up. I mouth back at her that I have to go out again, and she seems to

get the message. Or she doesn’t care. She waves at me and then says into the phone, “No, no, two bedrooms, not three...”

I don’t really need to turn right around and leave the house again. I told Michael an hour—and apparently forgot that nothing

in Oak Falls is that far away, and I could have easily gotten back with the coffee and then out to the Falls in under half

an hour. But I can’t just sit around here. I’m too jumbled up for that.

So I take the most winding route I can to the far edge of Krape Park. I even drive all the way around the golf course just

to make it take longer. And I still pull off the side of the road next to the overgrown merry-go-round sign twenty minutes

early.

But I’m not the only car. Michael’s pickup is already parked, leaning off the road onto the grass. The cab is empty. I can’t

help smiling a little, even though it kind of hurts. Both of us still anxious and early to everything.

Michael’s already sitting on the Lookout when I reach the bottom of the Falls. I can see him up there through the leafy curtain,

knees pulled up, idly scrolling on his phone. At least he’s not looking at me, which makes the slow climb up the overgrown

steps, pulling myself along on the exposed pipes, a little less awkward.

My heart hammers when I reach the top, and it’s only partly because of the climb. “Hey.”

He looks up, but he doesn’t look surprised or startled. I have a feeling he heard me coming. He doesn’t have earbuds in this

time, and it’s not that easy to stealth-climb the Falls steps. He nudges his glasses up on his nose with one knuckle. “Hey.”

“How long have you been here?” I shuffle carefully over and sit down next to him, letting my feet dangle over the edge of

the bluff.

“Not that long.” He looks down at his phone and then sets it down on the rock.

We’re quiet, both of us watching the mist rising up from the Falls, evaporating into the air in front of us, occasionally

with a bit of rainbow catching the light. The roar of the waterfall covers up the sound of my pounding heart and the five

times I have to swallow, trying to figure out how to speak.

In the end, he’s the one who breaks the silence. “You’re leaving.”

It’s not a question—just a simple statement. I look at him, and he looks back at me. The sunlight filtering through the canopy

of leaves overhead catches in his gray eyes and shines on his rumpled auburn hair. He’s wearing his beat-up jeans and a faded

U of I T-shirt, and something about his glasses, and this old college T-shirt, and his sinewy arms—it makes me feel like I

can finally see how my best friend from thirteen years ago turned into the man next to me. I can see high school Michael,

and college Michael, and this Michael all at once.

And I feel sad, all over again, that I missed so much. “Yeah, I am.”

He nods slowly, like he’s processing this, and looks back out at the mist rising in front of us.

I shrink, small and guilty. “How’d you know?”

He shrugs one shoulder, resting his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know. I think part of me always knew you weren’t going to

stay.” He glances at me. “I mean, there was a reason you left in the first place.”

“Yeah, but that was because I didn’t know there could be space for me here.” I don’t know why I’m arguing, because it doesn’t

change what I came here to say. “If I’d understood that...” I swallow, my mind flashing back to the bookstore last night.

For a second, I think, again, about telling him everything. To hell with whether he’d think I’d lost it. I want to tell him

every impossible thing that happened and believe that he’d believe me.

But I can’t. Maybe there are some risks I can’t make myself take. Or maybe I just don’t quite want to share all of that, not

even with Michael.

“If I’d understood that,” I say, “I’m not sure I would have been so eager to leave.”

Michael slowly lets his breath out. “Maybe not. But you did leave. And it changed you.”

My throat tightens. He’s saying everything I was going to—but it hurts so much more hearing it from him. “I’m still me,” I

say, even though it feels weak.

“Never said you weren’t.” It’s not accusing. Not angry. Just soft and even. “People change. You changed. I changed, even without

leaving. It’s just life.”

The shapes of the leaves around us blur. There’s a weight on my lungs, like a heavy block of iron. “You ever wish things had

gone differently?” I ask. “Or wonder what would have happened if they had?”

He’s quiet, for so long that I start to think he’s just going to ignore me.

And then he shifts, leaning back on his hands, and he says, “I wondered that pretty much every day after we both went to college.

Every time I came home for a break and you weren’t around. I’d get mad at myself for not trying to fix things that last year

of high school, when it would have been so much easier because we saw each other every day. And after I found out that you’d

come out, I felt... madder.” He ducks his head and glances at me self-consciously. “I guess the longer I let it go on,

the harder it felt to...” But his voice runs out.

Go back.

Rip up all the scar tissue.

Sit in that place of hurt all over again.

“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean.” I feel horribly sad for a moment that I didn’t think about him every day. That, as

more time went by, it got easier to bury it all.

But I guess that was my way of building scar tissue. Clean break. And as much as I wish I could go back and change that, it’s

still made me, well, me .

It’s the reason I have Olivia and Ian and Joan.

And I don’t really want to change that, either.

I take a slow, shuddering breath and say the thing I’ve been bracing myself to say ever since I texted Michael to meet me

here. “You could come with me.”

His eyebrows jump. “Come with you?”

“To New York.” My heart is pounding wildly again. “There are tons of schools there; there must be teaching jobs. You could come with me and—”

“Darby—”

“—be someplace with a Pride March, with so much queerness like it’s no big deal, and you wouldn’t have to worry about holding

my hand or kissing me—”

“What happened to needing a break from New York?”

I look down at the rock, stubbing a finger over the pocked surface. “I just...” But I don’t know what to say. I don’t know

how to explain that I’ll always get annoyed by how loud it is, I’ll be frustrated every time I have to haul something home

on the subway because owning a car would be worse, and I still have no idea what kind of job to look for or if I’ll ever be

able to quit renting and buy a place.

And I care about all that and simultaneously don’t care at all because it’s worth it. Because maybe I don’t need to love everything

about a place to belong there. Maybe I can choose to belong, even if occasionally pieces of me don’t quite fit, because I

belong with the people I found. The people I chose.

Because I did choose them, even if I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing.

“It’s the best fit for me.” I look up at him. “And I... I need to go back.”

He nods and looks back out at the Falls, chewing his lip. And then he looks at me, eyes pained, and says, “I fit here.”

“You could just come and try it out,” I say, even though I know what the answer’s going to be.

“You and I have been...” He shakes his head. “It’s been less than two weeks, Darby. I’ve lived here for... well, forever. I know you don’t understand it, but I love this place. I love the people I have here. I don’t need to be someplace with a Pride March or a ton of gay bars. And I know you think I’m going to high school football games and sitting with Natalie and Brendan to fit in or something, but... I like going to the football games. Natalie and Brendan aren’t as bad as they used to be, and yeah, they still are really fucking straight and sometimes annoy the shit out of me, but this is a small town. Everybody annoys everybody else sometimes. And maybe sometimes I get anxious at the thought of holding hands in public, or what might happen if someone sees me kissing another guy, but...” He shrugs. “People aren’t big here. People don’t do PDA, even if they’re straight. And I... I’m still trying to find some happy medium. I’m still figuring out how to be me here, but even with all of that, I still fit. Here. I need...” He looks around at the Falls, and the shady seclusion of Krape Park. “I need this.”

I feel like he’s drilled a hole straight through me. Even though I knew it was coming, a tiny resentful piece of me feels

like he’s telling me that this small town in the middle of nowhere matters more to him than I do.

But the bigger, calmer piece of me knows that this is exactly what he’s telling me, and of course he is. Because leaving changed

me, and staying changed him, and his people are here, just like mine are in New York.

Maybe Oak Falls isn’t a place that always made space for either of us, but he stayed anyway. He made space. He dug in and

held on and decided that it was enough. It was worth the work.

“So, we’re saying...” I swallow, but I can’t seem to get rid of the lump in my throat now. “That whatever this is...”

Michael leans forward, taking his weight off his hands. “It doesn’t need a name.”

“But it’s ending, right?” I know the answer to this already too, but I have to say it anyway. I have to hear him say it.

“Yeah,” he says.

I have a wild urge to suggest long distance. To suggest some kind of compromise. Who cares if it’s only been two weeks.

But I swallow it. I know, deep down, that we both need more freedom than that. That we both need to let this exist and end

in a way we can choose, rather than risk it disintegrating slowly as we both get pulled away.

I reach out, and his hand comes up, and I grasp it tightly, like if I squeeze hard enough, I can make up for every year I

was somewhere else. He squeezes back.

The question escapes me before I can stop myself. “Do you ever think maybe there’s some other version of everything? Some

version of reality where things went differently?”

Michael looks down at our interlaced fingers. “Like a parallel universe?” he asks.

“Yeah. Like that.”

He’s quiet for a while. I watch him—counting his eyelashes, watching the dappled reflections glint off his glasses.

“You remember Mrs. Siriani?” he says finally.

I blink. “Our physics teacher? Yeah, sure.”

He swallows. “I read this paper she left in the teachers’ lounge once. It was mostly weird quantum stuff I didn’t totally

understand, but... it was saying that there’s this theory of the universe. It says that every time we make a decision,

reality splits, like a tree branching.”

I shift closer to him until our arms are touching. Until I can lean my head against his shoulder.

“So in this version of life,” he says, “we follow one branch, the branch that leads us on from the decision we made. But maybe

there’s another life where we follow the other branch. The branch that leads us on as though we made the opposite choice.

Who knows—maybe there are infinite realities, and some different version of us lives in each of them.”

The Falls are swimming in front of my eyes again. “That’s some weird quantum shit.”

A laugh jerks out of him—I feel it in my bones. “Yeah. So... maybe in some other reality, I left. Maybe in some other life,

you stayed.”

My mind goes back to Young Darby staring at me in the half-light of the bookstore, full of fear and hope and vulnerability.

Maybe so.

Maybe it’s not that nothing changed. Maybe everything did. On another path. For that version of me.

Michael’s fingers loosen until he’s just letting our hands rest together comfortably.

But it still feels like a stage of letting go.

“You know,” he says, “I had sort of a weird dream last night.”

“What kind of dream?”

“We were back in high school, at your seventeenth birthday party.”

My breath hitches.

“But we didn’t fight. I think I knew we were supposed to, in the dream. But it was sort of like I was watching us, and we

didn’t. You told me who you were instead. And I told you who I was.” He takes a breath. Holds it. “Kind of like instead of

falling apart, we fell together.”

I feel like my heart has stopped. I’m completely still. “We did?”

“Yeah. I don’t know exactly; it’s kind of fuzzy now, trying to remember it.”

I lift my head off his shoulder and look up at him, but he’s squinting into the mist of the Falls.

“I think...” He hesitates. “I think I fell in love with you. And you fell in love with me.”

“Then what?” I’m afraid to breathe. Like I’ll break something if I do. “What happened?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I woke up.” He looks at me and a small crooked smile tugs on his mouth. “Kind of weird.”

“Yeah.” A bubble expands in my chest. The lump in my throat is slowly dissolving. I can breathe again. “Yeah, kind of weird.”

“When are you leaving?” Michael asks quietly.

“Soon, I think.” It’s easier to say now. “Maybe tomorrow. I want to make sure everything goes okay with the movers before

I go.”

He nods. “Have you told your mom?”

A small jolt of anxiety goes through me. “Not yet. But... I think she’ll be okay.”

Michael glances at me and smiles. “Oh, she’s always okay. She’ll be even more okay now that she won’t have to look at Jeannie’s

penguins.”

A laugh bursts out of me, but I sort of want to cry at the same time. “I’m going to come visit more. Maybe I’ll even get my

New York friends out here sometime. You’d like them.”

“I’ll come visit New York,” he says. “Over a break.”

I don’t know if he really means it. I think he does. I don’t know if it will actually happen, but I think he means he wants

it to.

“Can I call you sometimes?” My throat is closing up again. I squeeze his hand. “Can we still talk?”

He leans over and very gently kisses my forehead. And that’s answer enough.